Mitt Romney Strenuously Objects – He’s Severely Conservative!

Mitt Romney has been running for the Republican nomination for 5 years and he is as robotic and awkward as ever. Apparently the word “severely” was improvised in the line “I fought against long odds in a deep-blue state. But I was a severely conservative Republican governor.”

The worst part about that line is it is a lie. Romney is a liberal Northeastern Republican. His main weakness is coming across as inauthentic and that is a direct result of his ability (habit?) of pandering to whatever audience is listening to him at the moment.

It seems like this longer primary season has a chance to be good for him because he apparently needs the “practice” of getting better answers and coming up with better solutions to problems.

Now imagine private-equity boss Romney back at Bain Capital sitting down to read his team’s 59-point turnaround plan for some troubled widget maker. And imagine if the first two action items started with the phrase “Maintain current ….”

Romney probably wouldn’t bother reading any further before tossing the report in the trash, calling a meeting, and cracking heads. Heck, if Private Equity Romney were called in to turn around Romney Campaign Inc., axing CEO Romney might be the first move on his to-do list—especially after looking at last night’s numbers from Colorado, Minnesota, and Missouri.

Romney needs something better than maintaining his current campaign strategy and this is his chance to market test it against his current opponents. This assumes that it is primarily Rick Santorum and Ron Paul that he is running against. Both of those men are intellectually honest. Newt Gingrich wants to scorch the earth so nothing is left and he will need to be marginalized if the Republicans want to win the Presidency this year.

Paul can focus on fiscal issues and Romney can provide a contrast agreeing with Paul on the need for massive cuts in spending but doing so much more gradually which is in line with independents necessary to win in November.

Santorum is even more important. Mitt Romney has mentioned before the decline of the median income of the average American household, which is now $51,413 and that is up 4% from August when it was $49,434. What’s significant about this is Romney does worse among voters making under $50,000 than voters making more. Santorum should be able to speak well to the Rust Belt/Midwest voters and has argued the best against Romney’s blueprint for Obamacare in Massachusetts. If Romney can figure out how to beat Santorum in those states and on the healthcare reform issue, he will have a strong message for those swing states in the Fall.

II.

Here is a clip from Robocop as he attempts to arrest OCP Vice President Dick Jones. Dick Jones is The Bad Guy Behind The Bad Guy in the movie. But look at his right hand as he speaks at 1:53 to 2:15 in the clip. This is how the Jones character makes a series of points.

…and it’s also how Mitt Romney makes his points in debates.

In order to portray a ruthlessly deceptive executive, actor Ronny Cox likely took inspiration from the upper management-types in the 1980’s who all learned this communication technique in whatever business school or corporate cloning factory they are spawned from.

Unfortunately Mitt Romney was spawned from those same cloning mills and voters are subconsciously thinking: “I can’t vote for the bad guy from Robocop.”